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One-Party State?

By championing what it calls a long-overdue cultural revival, the BJP has steadily dismantled the old political establishment, pushing traditional opposition parties to the margins

By Ali Hassan Bangwar | July 2026

A truly multiparty political culture is the bedrock on which an inclusive, pluralistic, and progressive democracy is erected and thrives. Societies open to participatory political culture evolve along sustainable democratic pathways and yield invaluable socio-economic, political, and intellectual capital. However, those where democracy is increasingly threatened by exclusion, intolerance, and aggressive nationalism risk not only the hard-won gains of democratic consolidation but also the very foundations of inclusive governance. India, proud of being the world’s largest democratic polity, is increasingly regarded with skepticism for its gradual, systematic, and institutionalized drift toward a one-party political culture.

For over seven decades after partition, the idea of a one-party state in India was considered a constitutional impossibility. India’s demographic dynamics and political DNA — fractured by caste, language, region and religion — seemed hardwired against the kind of centralized hegemony found in more homogeneous political systems. Yet, following the BJP’s consolidation across multiple state elections and the political realignments of the past decade, that assumption is being seriously tested. Though the BJP may claim popular trust on the strength of its overwhelming electoral mandate, exploiting that mandate to consolidate political power — at the cost of India’s historically inclusive political legacy — rarely bodes well for the governed.

The BJP’s expanding dominance across states reflects a deepening of its political organization and signals an increasingly centralized decision-making culture. The opposition — the soul of any democratic political culture — is being steadily marginalized from mainstream politics. Political dissent is increasingly cast in anti-national colors; national institutions are being brought progressively under executive command; and financial and organisational resources are deployed to limit the opposition’s political viability — all of which raise serious questions about the future of multiparty democratic discourse in India.

The mechanisms of this hollowing-out are neither abstract nor invisible. The Electoral Bond scheme — introduced in 2017 and struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in February 2024 — enabled anonymous corporate donations to political parties on a massive scale, with the BJP emerging as by far its largest beneficiary; data later revealed that electoral bonds worth approximately Rs 16,518 crore were encashed by political parties, with disclosure deliberately stripped from the process. Simultaneously, the Enforcement Directorate has been deployed with conspicuous selectivity: since 2014, of 121 political leaders investigated by the ED, 115 belonged to opposition parties — a pattern so stark that fourteen opposition parties petitioned the Supreme Court in 2023 over its alleged misuse.

Also, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate just weeks before the 2024 general elections. He wasn’t alone—several sitting chief ministers from opposition parties found themselves in the crosshairs of central agencies during that period. On the press freedom front, India ranked 157th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index. The report pointed to a growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of big conglomerates seen as close to the ruling party. A big flashpoint was the Adani Group’s acquisition of NDTV in 2022, which many critics called the final nail in the coffin for independent mainstream television news.



For decades, the Congress party held the country together through a mix of secular politics and regional alliances. Looking back, it was a bit like the Roman peace—a surface-level stability that hid serious underlying tensions. The BJP has skillfully tapped into those fault lines. By championing what it calls a long-overdue cultural revival, it has steadily dismantled the old political establishment, pushing traditional opposition parties to the margins. With its dominance at the national level and growing strength in the states, many are now wondering if India’s politics is heading towards a one-party system.

The Indian National Congress, once a sprawling umbrella coalition, has been reduced to a marginal presence in over a dozen states

All of this has sparked real debate. Laws on religious conversion, questions about autonomy in universities, worries over media independence, and a shrinking space for dissent have left many Indians concerned about the overall health of the country’s democracy.

To some, these developments represent the consolidation of national unity and decisive governance; to others, they signal the gathering erosion of democratic pluralism. Standing at this juncture, India is walking a tightrope between majoritarian consolidation and constitutional pluralism. The central question is whether New Delhi is sustaining its pluralistic democratic inheritance or quietly dismantling it — with consequences the society may bear for decades.

The danger is that the machinery of one-party dominance — the institutional subordination, the legal harassment of rivals, the rewriting of history, and the majoritarian policing of personal faith and intimate life — can become normalized. Once normalized, it is nearly impossible to reverse. Pluralism is not a natural state; it is a fragile, deliberate construct that requires constant tending. When the state begins to see itself as the guardian of one culture and one political lineage, the garden of many flowers becomes a monoculture.

The first warning sign is not electoral victory itself but the systematic hollowing out of institutional resistance. India’s opposition today is not merely weak; it is functionally endangered. The Congress party, once a sprawling umbrella coalition, has been reduced to a marginal presence in over a dozen states. Regional parties — from the Trinamool Congress in Bengal to the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab and Delhi — fight isolated battles, unable to project a united national alternative.

Whether it can navigate the BJP’s consolidation and rebuild a credible national front before that space is irreversibly foreclosed depends on both its own strategic coherence and the ruling party’s trajectory. As things stand, the outlook is not encouraging. Across several recent state elections, the old idioms of secular statecraft have been losing their currency in an electorate increasingly drawn to an unapologetic, centralized majoritarian politics.

A stark indicator of this cultural consolidation is the proliferation of so-called “freedom of religion” laws, designed in practice to do the opposite. Of 28 states, approximately 12 have enacted legislation criminalizing religious conversions and interfaith marriages. These laws do not merely regulate religion; they police personal autonomy, institutionalize societal surveillance and signal to minority communities that their constitutional protections are subordinate to majoritarian anxieties.

The question for Indians is no longer whether they approve of the BJP or its Hindu-majoritarian project. The question is whether they are willing to inhabit a polity where no credible alternative can realistically emerge. If the opposition is allowed to expire — not by a coup, but by a thousand cuts of litigation, defections, and demoralization — the loss will not be merely that of a few political parties. It will be of the very idea of India as a plural, argumentative, and capacious civilization.

Indian political and social pluralism is not yet gone; it is under assault. Whether it survives will ultimately be determined not by the opposition’s electoral fortunes alone, but by whether India’s institutions — its courts, its press, its civil society — retain sufficient independence to resist the consolidation before the conditions for resistance are themselves foreclosed.

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